Smoking’s Impact on the Lungs

Whenever you watch a person smoking, think of the Palmolive bottle demonstration you saw the first day of the Stop Smoking Clinic. Visualize all of the smoke that goes into the bottle that doesn’t come out. Also, remember that the smoker is not only going to smoke that one cigarette. He will probably smoke another within a half-hour. Then another after that. In fact, he will probably smoke 20, 40, 60 or even more cigarettes by the end of the day. And tomorrow will be the same. After looking at cigarettes like this, you don’t want to smoke a cigarette, do you?

I always suggest that clinic participants follow this simple visualization exercise to help them overcome the urge for a cigarette. When I suggested it to one participant who was off for three days she replied, “I see, you want me to brainwash myself so that I don’t want a cigarette.”

Somehow I don’t consider this technique of visualizing smoking brainwashing. It is not like the ex-smoker is being asked to view smoking in an artificially horrible, nightmarish manner. To the contrary, I am only asking the ex-smoker to view cigarette smoking in its true light.

The Palmolive bottle demonstration accurately portrays the actual amount of smoke that goes in as compared to the small amount that you see the smoker blow out. Most smokers believe they exhale the majority of smoke they inhale into their lungs. But, as you saw by the demonstrations, most of the smoke remains in the lungs. When you visualize all the smoke that remains, it does not paint a pretty picture of what is happening in the smoker. Maybe not a pretty picture, but an accurate one.

When an ex-smoker watches a person smoke a cigarette, he often fantasizes about how much the smoker is enjoying it–how good it must taste and make him feel. It is true he may be enjoying that particular cigarette, but the odds are he is not.

Most smokers enjoy a very small percentage of the cigarettes they smoke. In fact, they are really unaware of most of the cigarettes they smoke. Some are smoked out of simple habit, but most are smoked in order to alleviate withdrawal symptoms experienced by all smokers whose nicotine levels have fallen below minimal requirements. The cigarette may taste horrible, but the smoker has to smoke it. And because the majority of smokers are such addicts, they must smoke many such cigarettes every single day in order to maintain a constant blood nicotine level.

Don’t fantasize about cigarettes. Always keep a clear, objective perspective of what it would once again be like to be an addicted smoker. There is no doubt at all that if you relapse to smoking you will be under the control of a very powerful addiction. You will be spending hundreds of dollars a year for thousands of cigarettes. You will smell like cigarettes and be viewed as socially unacceptable in many circles. You will be inhaling thousands of poisons with every puff. These poisons will rob you of your endurance and your health. One day they may eventually rob you of your life.

Consider all these consequences of smoking. Then, when you watch a smoker you will feel pity for them, not envy. Consider the life he or she is living compared to the simpler, happier, and healthier life you have had since you broke free from your addiction. Consider all this and you will – NEVER TAKE ANOTHER PUFF!

You can see how the smoke had darkened the bottle after about a few hundred cigarettes. You can start to see how the smoker’s lungs below became so discolored. Smokers don’t just put a total of a few hundred cigarettes in their system; they literally deliver hundreds of thousands of cigarettes over their shortened lifetime. This discoloration effect is more than just aesthetically unpleasant–it is in fact deadly.
Cancer is actually many different diseases with many different causes. If we look at cancer trends over the last century we see some amazing changes. While cancer was always around, it was different sites that were primary problems. Lung cancer, at the turn of the century was almost unheard of. If a doctor saw a case he would have easily gotten it printed up in a medical journal. Now, it is the major cause of cancer death in our society, killing more men and women than any other site. The primary difference between now and then is smoking. Before the turn of the century smoking was a limited practice. A very small percentage of people smoked and even the ones who did smoked many fewer cigarettes. Cigarettes were not even mass produced till the very end of the 1900’s.

We always hear of a cancer epidemic, how more and more people die of cancer every year. Actually, if you pull the smoking related sites out of the equation, cancer deaths have been on a decline. Some sites, like stomach the incidence dropped dramatically, not fully understood as to why. Other sites, like breast, even though the morbidity rate (number of cases) didn’t drop, because we now have better treatments and earlier detection, the mortality (death) rate has dropped.

But the smoking cancers; lung, mouth, lip, tongue, throat, larynx, pancreas, esophagus, pharynx, urinary bladder have all seen marked increases over the 20th century. These cancers have gone from obscurity to some of the major causes of death in our country. Actually, for the first time in a hundred years we are starting to see an early decline of morbidity and mortality because we are seeing fewer smokers now with the drop in the percentages of adult smokers.

Famous quotes

The only ’safer’ cigarette is your last one.Duane Alan Hahn
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You own yourself, so if you want to do something that destroys yourself, go ahead. Just don’t harm others when you do.Jim Goebel
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To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle.Confucius
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If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer. Clement Freud
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Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.King James I of England
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Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life. Brooke Shields
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I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It cost a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s a fantastic brand loyalty.Warren Buffett
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If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer. Clement Freud
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Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.Mark TwainRead more stop smoking quotes